Ariel

This poem is probably one of the closest to prose in the collection. The longer lines and the larger stanzas give this poem a bit of a short story effect as the persona’s feelings of effacement and desperation to escape the difficulties of this life are brought to light. It consists of nine stanzas in the form of septets (seven lines each stanza) with very little enjambment, the end stops giving a sense of completeness to each idea, almost annihilating any further need for contemplation as the feelings of despair and “numbness” that the persona outlines seem to be reflected through this structural choice. On the surface, this poem is about a woman that has been placed in hospital for a surgery and is struggling to deal with the vividness of the red tulips that have been gifted to her in amongst an almost totally whitewashed hospital room. Hughes says that Plath wrote this poem in early 1961 after she was hospitalised for an appendectomy and he also mentioned that this was one of Plath’s first poems written spontaneously, without the need for a thesaurus or any other help. She had actually had a miscarriage not long before this, so this also likely have influenced her poem and her emotional state. The tulips can be thought to represent a connection to life that seems to drag the persona back from the pit of despair she has placed herself in. Quite often in Plath’s poetry, flowers are said to symbolise life, and here, it is the vibrant life that her speaker wishes to leave behind in a place of serene quiet and escape.
 
The first stanza begins with the classification of “the tulips” mentioned in the title as “too excitable.” Despite the word “excitable” implying a sense of fervour and happiness, there is a caesura in this line indicated with a comma that takes away the positive connotations of this word. The continuation of the line “it is winter here” is a bit of a double entendre, as it reflects both the season of winter, but also the cold, closed up and white elements that winter brings. In using this description, Plath may be indicating a deeper, more profound idea of “winter” as “here” may refer more to the speaker’s own state than merely the weather. As the second line begins, it becomes clear that the persona is directing her poem to what may be an audience as she asks them to “look” at what she sees. Although not something commonly noted, this idea of including others may be a way for the speaker to almost justify her own experiences by extending them on to others and seeing that they too see what she does.

Through the use of a tricolon, she completes the picture of “winter” that she briefly begins in the first line as she describes “how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed in.” From this line, we begin to notice that all these allusions to and mentions of “white” may be referring to a hospital, as is more explicitly
stated later in the poem. Notice the approximant alliteration in the words “how,” “white,” “quiet,” and “snowed,” giving a sense of almost weightlessness feeling to the sensations of the persona. In the same way that ‘w’ isn’t a concrete/harsh consonant, the repetition of this sound creates an almost light-hearted air to the lines in which it is repeated. In this way, right from the beginning of the poem, the persona is able to reflect her feeling of being freed from the outside world and the “peacefulness” that is being expressed.

This feeling is explicitly stated in the third line as the speaker notes “I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly,” evoking the imagery of a patient in a hospital bed surrounded by “white walls” and “these hands,” trying to identify with her surroundings. The subsequent realisation that “I am nobody” and her dissociation from things like “explosions” minimise the significance of her identity. The final two lines of this stanza express a sense of effacement from her personality as the persona realises that, in the midst of the hospital, she is nothing. Breaking this down by each element mentioned: “I have given my name” (her name, her identity) “and my day-clothes up to the nurses” (a bit subtler, but this could refer to the idea that, by giving up her day-clothes she has remained in night, in darkness) “and my history to the anaesthetist” (looking at this closely, one’s history is what influences their future actions and drives their futures. In this way, the speaker is able to exhibit how she is renewed as she is “lying by [her]self quietly”) “and my body to the surgeons” (her body is her vessel with which she dictates her future. Including this on the same line on which she speaks about her “history”, she may therefore be exhibiting how they surgeons now dictate her future, as well as having taken her past).
 

As the second stanza begins, the use of imagery provides an expression of the effacement the persona feels as she expresses that “they have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff / Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.” In this way, the white of the “pillow” and “sheet-cuff” are effacing her body, yet her “head” is still showing, the way an “eye... will not shut.” Hence, the persona is able to express how, despite wanting to be completely effaced, her mind is still being drawn in to the world, observing the way an eye does when it “will not shut.” This primarily monosyllabic line reflects a sense of anger at this inability to be totally detached from the world, explicitly stated in the next line as she states “stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.” The internal rhyme within “stupid” and “pupil” is almost childlike in a way, (this repeated ‘oo’ sound associated with children and predominant too in the poem Daddy ) possibly outlining the regression to a childlike rebellion to something as natural as biology. In many ways, this links too to the statement earlier that the persona is “learning peacefulness,” so the use of the word ‘pupil’ is a bit of a pun, as it may also be referring to herself as being a ‘student of peacefulness.’

But, she is a “stupid pupil,” unable to fully detach from everything, thereby being unable to fully learn “peacefulness” as she has to “take everything in.” Notice the initial caesura in this line, drawing focus to this phrase before it. The fourth line exhibits what the pupil is taking in as the speaker begins to describe the nurses that “pass and pass.” The repetition of this word creates, ironically, a moving or consistent effect, whereby Plath is almost able to give the reader a connection to her speaker’s experiences within the hospital. This is something quite content to the speaker, as she notes that “they are no trouble,” likening their moving to “the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,” the traditional uniform for nurses in Plath’s time. Interestingly, when gulls pass inland, this is because they are able to sense when a storm is approaching and they come close to land to protect themselves. In this way, one can understand that using this simile in this poem might be a contemplation on how the nurses are within the hospital – “inland” – that is away from the storm outside. This line is therefore able to exemplify the idea that the hospital for the speaker is a place that is safe away from the turmoil of the world outside. As the nurses work in front of the speaker, they are “doing things with their hands,” a very broad and distant comment. By following this with “one just the same as another, / so it is impossible to tell how many there are,” she is able to describe how detached she is from everything, even within the confines of the hospital itself.

“My body is a pebble to them,” begins the third stanza, as the persona may be reflecting on her feelings of inadequacy and feeling of being “nobody.” They “tend” to her body “as water / Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently” – notice the word “must” here, as the speaker detracts from any connection the nurses may have to her, other than being just another part of their jobs as she is just another patient.
 
The idea of water running over pebbles does reflect this sense of being a brief and almost insignificant part of the nurses’ lives. The words “smoothing” and “gently” can be taken both that Plath is implying a caring environment, but to do so in a hospital, a place where action needs to be taken to be able to treat people of their ailments, may also be suggesting that what they are doing is merely superficial.

Continuing with this idea of mere “gentle[ness],” the speaker notes that “they bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.” Referring here to anaesthetic, there is almost a bit of an oxymoron through the use of the word “numbness” and “bright” in the same sentence. Reading into this, it may actually be a clever way for Plath to describe the total desire for a lack of connection to the world through describing something sharp and, for some, frightening as a needle as “bright” to remove the negative connotations. The end of this line, “they bring me sleep” ends with the long ‘ee’ sound in “sleep,” thereby becoming almost reminiscent of the rest she describes and allowing the reader to also feel this sense of ‘numbness’ that the speaker so longingly describes.

Returning to a focus on her speaker’s state, Plath’s line “now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage” has no punctuation throughout, seemingly amalgamating these ideas. Ironically, considering that this poem is reflective of a time in Plath’s own life, it is almost as if, within the confines of the hospital, the author herself loses all her connections to the outside world, including conventional grammatical rules. In this way, she is able to reflect how her thoughts too are “lost” as she now has no identity (“lost myself”), yet even in this time she still has the metaphorical (and even literal!) “baggage” weighing down on her. She begins to develop this idea by stating the literal baggage that still connects her to the world outside: “my patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox.” This line is an interesting one: “patent leather” is leather that has a smooth, glossy surface, but this does not take away the naturally dark-coloured and creased leather that is underneath. In this way, Plath may be hinting at the superficiality of the world through having sold such products. Likening it to a “black pillbox” compounds this admonition, as this can be broken down into both “black,” whose dark, destructive connotations entirely juxtapose the serene and peaceful “white” elsewhere in this poem, as well as “pillbox” which is more of a necessity that no one wishes to depend on. After this baggage is described, a comma ends this line, suggesting that the next line “my husband and child smiling out of the family photo” also constitute “baggage” for the speaker. While this seems like a positive comment on her family, the final line of this stanza “their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks” exhibits a bit of an ambivalence as to her connection with her family. Often, the mention of smiles in Plath’s poetry suggest delusion or perversity; in this case, we see that the smiles of her family seem to be unwillingly dragging her back to life, as she describes them like sharp “hooks.” This description is in itself a bit perverse, as it seems that even the positivity in the speaker’s life has become a cause for burden and “baggage.”

Reading into this in terms of Plath’s life, her fractured relationship with Hughes may have sparked such a comment, as well as an understanding of her mental condition possibly driving a desperation to escape any form of attachment that may require too much of her energy; apathy and lack of energy being common symptoms of depression, as well as simply being indicators of a life she doesn’t want to live.

There is a bit of a shift in tone at the beginning of the fourth stanza, as the persona expresses that “I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat / Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.” The first line indicates the sense of detachment the persona has, even to herself, as she calls herself a “cargo boat” that only appears to be a functioning human, through the line “stubbornly hanging on to my name and address” as identifiers. This term “cargo boat” is an interesting one that may tie in with the idea of “baggage” mentioned earlier; the persona expressing that she is nothing more than a weighed down “boat” of memories and attachments she does not want, creating what is indeed a picture of a burdened life. Plath ingeniously continues to use this imagery of a boat as she describes that “they have swabbed me clear of my loving associations,” the word “swab” both being a term for instruments used to clean ships, as well as the actual act of cleaning something away. This pun both emphasises this feeling of inanimateness the speaker has attributed to herself (likening herself to a “boat”), as well as the sense that she has been fully removed of her “loving associations,” therefore expressing a loss of connection to others, as well as the genuine care that comes with this.
“Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley” is the result of this lack of “loving associations” in her life, as Plath uses internal rhyme with the words “scared” and “bare,” emphasising the loneliness and vulnerability associated with these words as she seems to have a flashback to the surgery she went in to the hospital for. The plosive alliteration of “plastic-pillowed” is harsh, almost as if the persona is quite literally spitting out the words out of disgust at her state. Notice the colour green being used here, again in total juxtaposition to the pure white that is evident throughout this poem. This more vibrant colour does have a conventional element of disgust to it; “green plastic” could be said to evoke an image of rubbish or junk. In this way, she seems to emphasise how disgusted she feels by being so lonely, despite her seemingly desperate attempt to escape everything she knows throughout. While this seems contradictory to what we’ve seen throughout, by the end of the poem, we see that, despite Plath creating the tulips as being the ultimate reasons she is brought back to life out of the “snowed- in” and lonely hospital scene she so desperately wishes she could assimilate to, it is really all in her own mind. Because she so desperately wants a life that is meaningful, full of these “loving associations,” as does everybody, no matter how hard they may fight against it, she creates a greater meaning to these vibrant and lively tulips that eventually drag her back into the world, even if it is difficult. As she is on this “trolley,” the speaker states “I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books / Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.”
 
The use of repetition of “my” here, describing such trinkets and small, yet valuable belongings (unlike the “name” and “day-clothes” mentioned earlier, which were more of a necessity than something she valued), she describes how, not only was her personality stripped earlier (“I am nobody”), but now even the identifiers of her personality have come to “sink out of sight.” This alliteration here is actually a little bit ironic, as, looking at the rest of this line, it seems that she is the one who is drowning (“and the water went over my head”), not her belongings that are “sink[ing].” In this way, the reader gains an insight into how truly desperate the speaker is not to have any associations with the world, that even while seemingly drowning, herself, she pictures her connections to the world “sink[ing].” It is almost as if she is forcing herself to see everything she is associated to being taken away, whilst it is she that is in a state of despair. This stanza concludes with the assertion by the speaker “I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.” This metaphor of being a nun is reflecting this idea that she has left her life behind for the serenity she so desperately wants. The “pur[ity]” that is mentioned in the final line is ironically negative, considering that she had earlier described herself as “scared and bare.”

The fifth stanza is where the tulips are introduced, and they are negative symbols from the outset. She immediately states her distaste for them as she expresses “I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted / To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.” This latter line is reminiscent of a corpse, “empty” and with its hands upturned, and so the “flowers” are an antithetical embodiment of life, dragging her back from her “free[ing]” death wish. She directly addresses the reader as she, in a light-hearted and much more positive tone, remarks “how free it is, you have no idea how free,” beginning and ending this line with the words “how free” to express this all-consuming elation that she seems to feel about the idea of death. She builds on this by creating an almost celestial aura around something as morbid as death through the line “the peacefulness is so big it dazes you,” continuing the direct address.
This is almost therapeutic for Plath; keep in mind that this elation is still about death. It’s almost, as was exhibited in the first stanza, an attempt at justifying something she knows she shouldn’t be feeling by projecting it onto others and attesting that this is something they too, as fellow human beings, will be able to relate to. There is still definitely an air of delusion here, yet this is encompassed by a true longing. She goes on to describe how “it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.” This is interesting considering the previous stanza where she explicitly mentions her own trinkets “sink[ing] out of sight.” Based on what we established earlier about her being the one drowning, it is almost as if she is saying that she has done this herself in order to be able to attain this “peacefulness” of death she so desperately craves.

As for the name tag, she has also surrendered this “up to the nurses” at the beginning of the poem; she is almost explicitly stating how, in this hospital, she is ready and willing for death to come. Notice the word “finally” in the next line immediately following “it is what the dead close on,” expressing this sheer desire to join the ranks of those who have passed on. This scene continues as she pictures the dead; “I imagine them / Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.”
 
This positive imagery seems to come to a halt with the word “shutting” on the next line, harshly contrasting the previously celestial atmosphere. Furthermore, the notion of “clos[ing] on” may refer to this idea of settling a legal agreement or deal, so it is almost as if she is saying the dead “close on” their eternity by giving up their “name” and “trinkets.”

As this tangent about death seems to come to a close, the speaker returns to a focus on the tulips. She comments that they “are too red in the first place, they hurt me.” “Too red” seems almost a childlike argument, as Plath is unable to realise why they “hurt” her so. As her focus on them continues, despite her previous attempts not to focus on them, she gives them life as she remarks that “even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe,” giving it almost a predator-prey association. This idea is echoed in the next stanza as she bluntly describes how “nobody watched me before, now I am watched,” further extending this predatorial imagery of these flowers. The words “even through” suggest that their “breath[ing]” is quiet, in almost the same way that a predator breathes quietly as they are ready to catch their prey and is expanded upon in the next line as she describes them to be breathing “lightly... through their white swaddlings... like an awful baby.” This last part can be linked back to this idea of her ‘child smiling through the photo’ and can be linked to many other poems where she describes the struggles of motherhood, namely Morning Song. Here, it may not be that it is “awful” because of something negative, rather it symbolises the dependency a baby might have on her and this drags her back to life and out of the serenity she has attempted to create for herself.
She continues: “their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.” This can be interpreted in a number of ways, but one way is that she is primarily describing how they are adding to her pain through their vividness and brightness. Looking into it further, she is choosing to remain passive in this line as it seems their “redness” is corresponding with her “wound” alone. She has detached herself even from the ailment that has brought her into the hospital, allowing her to remain the victim of the animalistic tulips. “They are subtle, they seem to float, though they weigh me down” – this line can be understood as a possible beginning of the speaker’s realisation that these feelings are all of her own mind. She slowly comes to realise that the tulips may not be the creatures that create this weight with which she is dragged to life again and that it is in her own mind. She continues with another example of a childlike deduction as she comments that the tulips are “upsetting [her] with their sudden tongues and their colour” – childlike in that it is a simple understanding that can make a flower upset a person. Keep in mind that “upset” too can mean to knock over, so using this word almost doubly emphasises the release from peace that she so desperately craves. Their “sudden tongues” continue this predatorial imagery with the word “tongues” implying she is to be devoured by them as their prey, this “sudden[ness]” reflecting the vibrancy these tulips bring in a room that is almost completely white.
 
One of the most famous lines of this poem ends this stanza: “a dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.” Looking into this line both by meaning and stylistically – Plath’s vivid imagery here expresses her earlier comment that the tulips “weigh her down.” She ingeniously forces us to feel the words “red lead” – not only is this an example of an internal rhyme, but it also slows down the line and almost feels heavy to say itself, reflecting this feeling within her words (the shift from the ‘d’ sound at the end of ‘red’ is pronounced at the back of your throat, while the ‘l’ sound at the beginning of ‘lead’ uses the front, forcing you to slow down your speech and almost weighs down the words as you speak). Again, this idea of being prey to the tulips is expressed in this line as she is being choked by the tulips (“round my neck”), but also in that a “lead sinker” is part of a fishing line. This can be taken as part of this idea earlier that she is drowning (“the water went over my head”) but again returns us to this idea that she has created the predatorial nature of the tulips in her own mind, subconsciously wanting to remain, despite an apparent desire to die. Although a fish gets caught during fishing, they are the ones that have to take the bait; Plath is blaming the tulips for bringing her back, but she also has a part in getting caught, being reeled back into life.

The seventh stanza opens with the idea that the tulips are her predators as she notes that “nobody watched me before, now I am watched.” However, taking this on a deeper level, Plath may be insinuating that “nobody watched” her or gave her the attention she needed like the tulips are now. It may be because of this that she feels this newfound connection to life, even if she so desperately attempts to categorise it as negative. She creates suspense as she remarks “the tulips turn to me,” with the alliteration of the letter ‘t’ in emphasising this fear she feels, as well as having this short idea immediately following “I am watched” on the previous line. She then turns to her surroundings as she remarks “and the window behind me / Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins.” This is a beautiful way to describe the sun rising and setting in her room, but notice the difference here in comparison to the first stanza, where she saw the light as something static and unmoving (“the light lies”) rather than something moving with the days, as she now does here. It is only “slowly” that she sees this – the repetition of this word slowing down the line in conjunction with this idea – as it is arguably, at this point, that she is beginning to see life as a more positive thing than something she is forced to be a part of.

The self-realisation encapsulated in the declaration “and I see myself” is something of a turning point in this poem. She personifies the sun and the tulips as she is between the “eye[s]” of them both, compounding the idea of effacement, as she is seemingly engulfed by the sun and the tulips within her room. The words “flat” and “a cut-paper shadow,” reflect being something insignificant, which is echoed a couple of lines later as she comments “I have wanted to efface myself.” She also says “I have no face” before stating “I have wanted to efface myself.” While she seems to be contradicting herself here, we can actually translate it in the way that her views of herself are slowly being reversed – sometimes even immediately after each other in a line – as she comes closer to an idea of acceptance of herself. The final line “the vivid tulips eat my oxygen” reflect this fight she is having with the tulips for life. One way to interpret this is the idea that she personalises “my oxygen,” possibly referring to the life that she herself has created away from all her responsibilities and surrounded by serenity.
 

She still sees them as her enemy, and they are, quite literally in this line, taking her breath away as she tries to escape this world. This line is the perfect way to introduce the next stanza, as she explains how the tulips are “concentrat[ing] [her] attention.” Stanza eight is primarily a description of the tulips themselves and their effect on the speaker. Notice how Plath has almost honed in from the start of the piece, from just mentioning the tulips in the first line, to having the bulk of the final three stanzas focused around the “vivid tulips” and their relationship to her. In this way, we see a progression from total detachment to life (the primary meaning of the tulips), to a slow but eventual reviving. “Before they came, the air was calm enough,” reflecting how peaceful the persona felt before the tulips. This is reflected in the next line “coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.” The prosody of both “coming and going” as well as “breath by breath” creates a pulse of peacefulness prior to the tulips’ presence. The ending of this line “without any fuss” is an imperfect rhyme when paired with the end of the line prior, “the air was calm enough,” which is broken in the next line “then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise” in the same way that the rhythm of the silence in which the speaker was in is broken by the “loud noise” of the tulips.

The next two lines provide the imagery of an incongruously placed “rust-red engine” as the speaker reflects on the air around the tulips: “now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river / Snags and eddies round a sunken rust- red engine.” The constant movement of the air is reflected in the repetition of the words “snags and eddies” that reflect this movement of water around an object that is out of place. She therefore reflects how, despite the red tulips being out of place in the hospital room (the same way that the “rust-red engine” is “sunken” and out of place in a river), they have become the focus of the space and therefore the most significant element in the room. The final two lines are more explicit about the effect on herself that she has been alluding to throughout the poem as she states “they concentrate my attention, that was happy / Playing and resting without committing itself.” In this way, she reflects how she has wanted not to commit to the world, to have her attention at “rest” from the rest of the world around her. Notice the enjambment in the second last line after “was happy” as the speaker seems to come to the stark realisation that this happiness she felt has to stay in the past.

By the end of the poem, the speaker is realising the world around her coming to life and is, indeed, herself brought back to life as well. “The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves” the stanza begins; a complete contrast to the “white walls” that were mentioned in the first stanza. This is our first insight into the life that the speaker is seeing in the room as she begins to escape the desire for death. Worth repeating here that all these perceptions of the world around the speaker are really all in her own head, so everything that happens can be taken as a journey for the speaker from total absence to becoming present with the world around her. Notice the slow “seem to be warming themselves,” the dragging on of “seem” and its ambivalence indicating a slow but significant return to life.
 
This gradualness is reflected in the speaker’s still seemingly negative opinion of the tulips in the next two lines, “the tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; / They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat.” On the surface, this seems like a bold statement about her hatred towards the tulips, the words “dangerous animals,” the prison-like “behind bars” suggesting they are criminals, as well as the predatorial imagery of the line “they are opening like the mouth of some great African cat” creating the idea of a lion about to consume its prey. But these lines reflect a lot more than just this. Yes, we picture a lion here, but notice that she doesn’t use the word “lion” explicitly, opting for “great African cat” instead, which almost domesticates it.

This is another instance in the poem, after “awful baby,” where the speaker gives the tulips life; this also follows the likening of them to a lifeless “rust-red engine,” so we do see a progression here. This is also used in the poem Morning Song where the speaker slowly comes to see her child as more than something effacing her through beginning with similes about it being lifeless and slowly seeing it, similarly to this poem, as a “cat.” In this way, we are able to see that, underneath the feelings of fear that the speaker wants to have for the tulips, she is still beginning to see them as a living presence in her own that are “opening” not to viciously devour her as she may think, rather to bring her back to the life from the pit of “white” that would lead to her demise. Again, this idea is reflected in the next two lines as we can see the speaker herself come to realise the presence and the significance of the tulips as being from her own self. Line four of this stanza is a beautiful way to describe her heartbeat “and I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes.” There is enjambment here, meaning this is an incomplete sentence, but this stylistic choice reflects the life in Plath that she has regained now by the end of the poem.

This continues to become “opens and closes / Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love for me.” It is here that the speaker has come to realise the reason behind the tulips, primarily due to the double meaning of “red blooms” – evoking imagery both of a heart pumping red blood in ways that bloom throughout her body, and the agricultural term for a flower that reminds us of the eponymous tulips. Hence, the speaker has come to realise that it is her heart, the common symbol for love, that has brought about the idea of the tulips to bring her back to life. It is “out of sheer love” for herself, a great step in her recovery, to have made the tulips seem to “vivid” at a time when the world was so “white” and dragging her out of life. The end of the poem is where the persona’s life has begun to return to her, as she so distantly and, almost in a confused way, describes “the water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,” as she reader understands she has begun to cry. Notice the ambiguous way Plath chooses to describe this; it is almost as if the persona has been so out of touch with life and living for so long that this true exhibition of human emotion has become what is almost a distant concept to her, “like the sea.” The final line “and comes from a country far away as health” may be a little confusing at first. However, reading into it, we can see how this is an indication of how this is just the beginning of the speaker’s journey to “health.” These tears that she is crying are just the first step in a long journey to “health.” She describes it as a “far away... country” in order to express the journey she must take towards recovery, the tulips having just begun to help her come back to life.